I typically like to practice the principle of charity, which is to assume that everyone is making an argument in good faith. I've wasted enough of my life on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet to understand that this is a fool's game, but nonetheless[tk].
And once again, I found myself on Twitter devouring another thread of bad webcomics. This time it's Stonetoss. From an initial pass it's pretty exceptionally bad. It hits all the spots:
- lazy art
- lazy jokes
- incredibly bad opinions
- the opinions are very wrong, folks
- you got your anti-sjw-ism
- you got your anti-semitism
- it peaks at Holocaust denial
- but at times it's also anti-Zionist, which is, uh, good?
- you got your "who's the real racist here"
ah shit. principle of charity. lets try again.
Throwing away my very correct notion of what makes a webcomic bad, it's pretty fun to put some of the more egregious ones under the microscope of literary analysis. You don't need to agree with the politics or sense of humor of a work of art in order to understand how it works. Looking through Stonetoss, here's what I found out: the opinions are bad, but the delivery mechanism for the opinions? They're also very bad
But this strip is special.
You know that viral tweet about the English sentences that appear to parse at first glance, but semantically don't make any sense? This is that in comic form. 1984 is well-known to be one novel conservatives actually bothered to read in high school, and they never let you forget it. So reading the first panel alone my brain was already preparing to reel for a "we're already living in a thought police state" punchline. But that's not what it is. Actually it's very much different, because that punchline had already been done in an earlier comic.

No, that's not what it is. That form of joke relies on setting up the stage with a comparison to a setting that is perhaps similar to our own, and can obviously be seen as the thought police state given the additional context. It's not exactly clear what the politics Stonetoss is advocating here. Is it pro-beware-1984? Is it pro-being racist or anti-immigrant? Surface level analysis resists any coherent philosophy. Let's consider what happens:
ACT 1: Onionhead A on Facebook is unable to imagine the oppression 1984 reified. ACT 2: Onionhead B makes a racist remark ACT 3: Onionhead B is called out and persecuted for the racist remark.
One other common theme in Stonetoss, and indeed many of the other bad webcomis, is transgression. Usually it's there for shock value, but more often than not the transgression itself is the punchline. And yet even with this lens the comic is incomprehensible. The most salient evidence for this is perhaps the racist comment, but it's not clear that this is present at face value. Onionhead B is restrained by what is presumably a literal manifestation of the Thought Police (who is dressed more like a crossing guard tk) for being racist. So racism is bad. I find it hard to believe that this is the theme Stonetoss's author would end with, so the comic needs one more level of ironic reversal to resolve that tension. There is the cryptic final line, "Got a loicense for that racism, mate?", but it could be interpreted either way. Read literally, maybe racism is a human right but it needs to be regulated? Or if read facetiously, there is no license for racism, and racism continues to be bad. I doubt this avenue of thinking will be fruitful.
We can take a deeper panel-per-panel analysis:
PANEL 1 [Slightly squished onionhead avatar, harsh background, smug smile, squinty eyes] JAMES SMITH 4HRS * 🌏 JUST READ 1984. WOW, IMAGINE LIVING IN A WORLD WHERE THOUGHT-CRIME IS REAL... LIKE COMMENT SHARE
Lots to unpack here. This man has a shit-eating grin. Clearly this is a man who thinks he is smarter than he actually is, and thus is likely to do pseudo-profound Facebook posts. This is a man to be despised. This is coherent with the text of the panel. While this man has read 1984 (in the author's worldview a prescient, good, and correct book), the reason the smugness isn't well deserved is because his reading is short-sighted, and he isn't able to recognize the themes of 1984 in the real world. It's implied that thought-crime IS real. James is the fool.
If we give credence to the status updated being posted on what appears to be Facebook, we have to acknowledge the baggage of performative posting and (ugh) virtue signaling that comes with it. This maligns James further.
PANEL 2 [PANEL 1 shifted up] [similar avatar, softer background color, wider eyes, maybe more sincere smile] TOM JENKINS KEEP IMPORTING 3RD-WORLD SAVAGES AND YOU WON"T HAVE TO IMAGINE
This Tom fellow is a foil to our fool James. James appears smug, but Tom seems more sincere. This aligns Tom with the calm-headed, the rationalists. He's correct and doesn't need to show it off because he's correct. His is the voice of reason. And reason, in this case, is having the Normal opinion that open immigration policies are bringing in the worst of the outsiders, who are by the way strictly sub-human.
One possible caveat to this reading is that Tom is positioned as a Reply Guy. The normal archetype for this is that of someone sharing their unwanted comments. However, I don't think this matches the author's worldview. In the alt-right's view, free speech and press are unalienable, so being a Reply Guy is a human right.
This panel presents us with a conflict between James and Tom. There's evidence to show that Tom, the one who is likely the stand-in figure for the author, is the more advantageous, since the visual presentation of his argument is favorable. Superficially it's a reversal of the first panel, but they are both internally consistent.
Let's simplify what we've learned:
THOUGHT-POLICE BAD THOUGHT-POLICE IS REAL CASUAL RACIST COMMENTS ARE COOL
PANEL 3 [PANEL 2 shifted up] TOM JENKINS SDSKKKSASNGDSHHGJGUSDDS
Now some new tension, unrelated to the conflict between comments. This key mashing presents a mystery, to be trivially solved in the next comment.
I won't dwell on this panel much since it mostly functions as a literal transition. But I have to draw attention to the KKK substring in the random string. There are only 3 instances of consecutive repeating characters in the string, and none of them have a repetition length longer than 2. The non-consecutive frequency of letters like S, D, and G lead me to believe that the author mashed keys on the home row. The frequency of characters suggests they initially mashed with their left hand, and moved rightwards, but the KKK presses are an anomaly in this pattern. I can't figure out what method of chaotic finger movements might result in such an orderly anomaly, so I have to assume they intentionally inserted it there. Why? I have no clue. tk elaborate
PANEL 4 ......................................sleepy [editors note: i fell asleep on the plane, and awoke with enough clarity to question why i wrote this in the first place]